November 2005 Archives

Please...
  write what you know
  but also:

    know something interesting.

They're telling shapeless stories
at the open mic

reading from travel diaries
picking up where they left off last week

and Yaniv wants to shout:
"Get a blog!"

Never gave thanks.
Never had blogs.
Owned slaves. Some of them owned slaves.
Were shorter than us on average.

Yes, some of them fought against it
tried to move things 
    forward 
    toward

a blinding 
bright world 
but

not all of them.

Like "stinky"
in MadLibs,
she always delivered.

Most people don't like ghosts.
But everybody loves circus ghosts.

Circus ghosts may not remember
who they were in the real world or
what kind of car they drove.

But they remember their tricks.

They say: "Watch me juggle. I can eat fire."

"oooOOOOOoooo."

"I can eat fire."

We played with sticks for a while, my people
looking for wood that was strong and flexible,
turning it into specialized sticks.
Sticks for scratching
for digging out hard to reach
infected patches.

Then we made the Torah.

The pencil they gave me
was covered with paint. I scraped at it.

Artisan, whole-leaf paint chips
dropped off
in spidery clumps.

And now I can see, it is an artisan pencil.
Made by a man in the mountains of Peru.

Separated out from the base of a Peruvian Pencil Tree.

Peru.
It is a savage land.

And there's my friend, the legendary artisan
with his Peruvian pencil-carving knife, its handle
snapped clean off
from the root of some
mountain vegetable.

Most of the knife is edible, in fact.
Even the blade.
But only if you cook it long and slow.

And who would eat such a thing?
Who would eat the knife cooked tender?

Someone with a pen, no doubt.
Or a typewriter.

Welcome
to the Golden Age
of me flossing my teeth.

An upgraded Age of Reason
and now even the common man understands

that the pale dots
on my bathroom mirror
are just pale dots and not some grim portent.

At night there is light
in this magical time.

I am guided by the soft reflection of
my polished mouth bone

and these gums
have never felt
so fierce.

To you
who live 
  in states 
  that vote 
today
I say:
  Happy voting!

only the vertical blink-blink on the horizon
gives any sign of
all these emails
passing
in the blink-blink
night.